God, Evil, Matter, and Mind

How both theists and atheists stand pat in the face of objections.

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Comments

[Mike]

Bill,

I’m not standing pat on this, but what if one looked at Zeno’s paradox considering Plank length - the shortest physically measurable distance - which would give discrete units of space instead of a progressive multiplication of fractions which lead to infinity.

[Ben]

Bill,

I appreciate this post after your one about defending the reasonableness of atheism. I was going to ask the what inclines you toward theism over atheism. I'm aware you believe that no substantive philosophical position is decisively rationally compelling. But you obviously still find some positions rationally more acceptable than others.

I agree, anyway, about your contention about the reasonableness of atheism but with a qualification. Even putting aside the question of the atheism's justification that you focused on in your post, the atheism-as-worldview of the likes of Nietzsche, Sartre, Camus, Hume, et al. is intellectually respectable. However, the cyberpunk Cult of Gnu atheism (New Atheism), both in terms of justification and lack of philosophical sophistication that betrays its acerbic attitude toward the religious, is not.

One of the reasons I'm a Christian theist is the negative case against atheism due to the paucity of intrinsically atheistic materialist and naturalistic explanations to even get "off the ground," so to speak, when it comes to things like morality, the intelligibility and order of universe, beauty, the mind and what it is to be thinking "piece of meat," etc. "Inconsistency" is a delicate way to put it. An atheistic universe, when thoroughly unpacked, always ends up seeming really kooky to me -- Mackie's "queer" except applied to the universe as a whole instead of just objective moral values. This atheistic universe of the philosophers always seems so far divorced from the everyday intuitions, experiences, beliefs, especially the ritualized and practiced ones, that religious and non-religious people build their lives upon.

For example, imagine this conversation between husband and wife in a kitchen:

"Dear, why do love me?"
"Sweetheart, it is because I still get that rush of oxytocin every time we, as bipedal, albeit relatively clever, apes -- one of many animal species that have evolved to only become extinct years later on this backwater planet within a backwater solar system of a galaxy barely out of its diapers -- copulate instinctively to pass on our genes to our would-be offspring of our coupling, so they could do it again under the auspices of natural selection, and so forth."
"..."

I'd imagine the waifu here would not be amused with that answer, finding it deeply unsatisfying and perverse given how humans typically interact and behave. It's a non-starter based on her and everyone she knows' lived experience. She senses there's more to life than the Darwinian processes her husband described, even if they to some extent play a part in their human coupling. But she recognizes, perhaps only inchoately, its not the only part, and it was not only crass but absurd for her husband to insist that it was.

[So she strikes him hard with her hot wooden ladle].

Again, "inconsistency" is being polite. "Inadequate," for me, is just more accurate, and I think you begin to drive at this in your last couple paragraphs with your critique of the glib answers and neuroscientific redoubts materialist philosophers of mind extol and retreat to when confronted with the problems of qualia, intentionality, etc.

It's a generality, but I find a lot of truth from Francis Bacon in that "A little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion."

[Vito B. Caiati]

Question: Since from the onset the Christian theist, for example, recognizes that there are matters that exceed his powers of cognition that can only be known through faith in what has been revealed, such as what appear illogical or contradictory—for example, the doctrines of the God/Man or one God of three Persons--is he not more entitled to rely on faith than the atheist, who invokes it only in the last instance, abandoning his customary commitment to proclaim as true only what can be scientifically or logically demonstrated by now trusting in possible future scientific discoveries of intellectual breakthroughs? In other words, is a slight of hand not at work here, in which the atheist rather arbitrarily slips in the notion of faith, which he customarily ridicules when employed by the theist?

[Tom Tillett]

Ben: >>One of the reasons I'm a Christian theist is the negative case against atheism due to the paucity of intrinsically atheistic materialist and naturalistic explanations to even get off the ground …<<

Excellent comment. I might put it more generally: atheism ends, in whatever direction you take it, in a nihilism. It is not, therefore, tenable as a mode of living without a denial of its own premises.

In re: the rest of your comment. Consider this Chesterton quote: "Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her." --> Orthodoxy. Love is a lived experience of someone that you reason from, not something you reason to. It forms the premise of reasons, frequently leading to loving actions (I'll walk the baby and let her sleep); it is not a conclusion from a prior set of scientific-materialistic assumptions and deductions. Love as a lived experience functions like a Wittgenstein hinge proposition --> On Certainty.

This same philosophic reasoning applies fairly well to the religious sphere and makes - for me - at least one rational ground (there are others) for the belief in the reality of a God-relationship and all that follows from that. So, I agree that Bacon was on to something.

[BV]

Ben,

See here: https://open.substack.com/pub/williamfvallicella/p/theistic-religious-belief-and-what?r=f3tzc&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

[BV]

Vito,

I agree with your point. It is inconsistent for the naturalist to hijack such words as 'faith' and 'hope.' By contrast, these words are essential to the vocabulary of Christianity and other revelation-based religions.

Although it is probably only a typographical error on your part, I will point out the common mistake of confusing 'sleight of hand' with 'slight of hand.'

Remember the Seinfeldian Soup Nazi? I'm the Language Nazi.

[BV]

Ben,

You taught me a new word, 'waifu.' https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Waifu
I think I'll stick with 'wifey.'

[Dominik Kowalski]

Bill,

atheism ends, in whatever direction you take it, in a nihilism. It is not, therefore, tenable as a mode of living without a denial of its own premises.

I'm more cautious here. You're certainly right about every version of naturalism, but I'm a little less certain about atheism as such. Certainly, you have a more, say, tolerant definition of what would fall under the umbrella of "theism" than a William Craig, who I'm taking as an example because in his discussion of a study about religiosity he explicitly counts Shinto in Japan as an atheistic worldview. I can only imagine that he does that as well for the other major asian philosophies. But under such a narrow view of what constitutes theism, your statement above would surely be false.

Cutting to the chase, I'm wondering if you regard nihilism essentially as a denial of a teleological arrow? That the final cause must be grounded in the ultimate seems undeniable, equally the fact that there must be some kind of broad mental life within it. Of course, that's still consistent with the denial of a being capable of responding to prayer or being involved with the entities emanated by it.

Essentially, the question that has been keeping me busy for quite some time now is where we have to draw the line. How theistic must a worldview be in order to avoid nihilism, how atheistic can it be? The division between what might fall under the big tent of theism and non-naturalist atheists is very hard to pinpoint, if it exists at all.

[BV]

Dominik,

You are confusing me with Tom. Your comment is directed to him, not me.

But you have the makings of a good point. Buddhism, if we agree that it is a religion, is an atheistic religion, in its original Pali form. The atheism of Pali Buddhism is an immediate consequence of the anatta/anatman doctrine. This prompts the question: Is Buddhist atheism nihilistic?

That depends on how we define 'nihilism.' Here is Nietzsche's definition:

Der Wille zur Macht #585 (Kroener Ausgabe):

Ein Nihilist ist der Mensch, welcher von der Welt, wie sie ist, urteilt, sie sollte nicht sein, und von der Welt, wie sie sein sollte, urteilt, sie existiert nicht.

"A nihilist is one who judges of the world as it is, that it ought not be, and of the world as it ought to be, that it does not exist."

Is that what you mean?

[Tom Tillett]

Dominik, Bill,

Dominik, I was thinking of atheism in its predominant American form as a "version of naturalism," so I take it you agree with the statement in that context. But what I said after the quote does not easily apply to non-naturalistic atheisms like the Buddhism Bill referenced.

I think Bill is right that we need a definition of nihilism. If I can make any sense of Nietzsche's definition of nihilism, he seems to be saying that any denial of the existence of the world is nihilistic. He identifies two forms: a willed refusal to accept the world as it is rather than what we want it to be and a willed denial that the world exists at all based on commitments to an ideal or ideality.

If this is correct, it would seem to follow that Buddhism as Bill presented it would be a form of nihilism. But it would not clearly cover the case of the naturalistic atheist. They do not deny existence qua existence; to the contrary, they hold up the empirical factuality of the world as the only really real thing and conclude that God does not exist. But as Vito points out, the atheist maintains this position by incorporating concepts that are dependent upon a God, things like faith and hope, but also I would include things like physics and mathematics and other non-physical ideal concepts that give their world the concreteness they believe it has.

So, I would expand Nietzsche's definition to include a denial of the reality of ideal concepts, such that any philosophy or religion that denies or diminishes the reality of ideal concepts or the existence of the world is a form of nihilism. The argument, then, would go like this: since God is the ultimate rational guarantor (Creator, Source, Sustainer) of the reality of both ideal concepts and existence, then any philosophical or religious atheism would be nihilistic in logical form, if not in practice.